Welcome to the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) OpenText Content Server Guide.
This repository serves as a comprehensive, step-by-step documentation series and practical lab environment. I created this guide to help demystify OpenText Content Server (OTCS), breaking down complex enterprise concepts into digestible, real-world scenarios.
Whether you are a new system administrator trying to understand metadata, or a developer looking to build custom HTML dashboards and REST API integrations, I hope this guide serves as a valuable and practical reference for your daily work.
Enterprise Content Management systems are vast and can often feel overwhelming. This guide is built around a cohesive, real-world scenario—an HR Employee Onboarding Process—to ensure every feature you learn is tied to a practical business use case.
By following these 15 labs sequentially, you will journey from basic folder creation all the way to advanced headless API automation.
Note: This guide was primarily developed and tested against OpenText Content Server 21.1, though many of the core concepts apply to other recent versions.
To make learning manageable, the 15 labs are divided into five logical phases:
The foundation of any ECM system. Learn how to structure data, secure it, capture it, and find it.
- 📂 Lab 01: Categories & Metadata - Design metadata schemas and enforce data governance.
- 🔐 Lab 02: Users, Groups & Permissions - Master Identity & Access Management (IAM) and strict Access Control Lists (ACLs).
- 📝 Lab 03: Forms & Templates - Capture structured data and map metadata to relational SQL tables.
- 🔍 Lab 04: Search Configuration - Build metadata-driven advanced searches, use wildcards, and save global queries.
Bridge the gap between digital systems, physical reality, and user interfaces.
- 🖥️ Lab 05: Perspective Management - Customize the Smart View UI with role-based dashboards and widgets.
- 📦 Lab 06: Physical Items - Digitally map physical real estate (Facilities/Shelves) and cross-reference paper archives with digital records.
Eliminate manual email routing by designing intelligent, automated business processes.
- 👤 Lab 07: Workflow User Steps - Design Workflow Maps, User Steps, and Dispositions (Approve/Reject).
- 🤖 Lab 08: Workflow Item Handlers - Automate the system: dynamically create folders and move documents using Replacement Tags.
- ⚙️ Lab 09: Workflow Process Step - Manipulate internal workflow data and copy payloads to audit archives.
- 🔗 Lab 10: Sub-workflows & Milestones - Build modular parent/child workflows and track SLAs with milestones.
- 🔀 Lab 11: Workflow Evaluation - Write Expression Builder logic to handle conditional branching and error loops.
Give managers deep visibility into the system and customize the platform using web technologies.
- 📊 Lab 12: LiveReports - Write direct SQL queries against
DTreeCore&KUAFtables to build dynamic data dashboards. - ⚡ Lab 13: WebReports & WR Triggers - Use OpenText's proprietary
RepTaglanguage to create event-driven automation (e.g., auto-renaming uploaded files). - 🌐 Lab 14: WebReports UI Development - Inject modern HTML5, CSS3 (Dark/Light mode), and Vanilla JS into WebReports to build responsive frontend portals.
Connect OpenText to the outside world.
- 🔌 Lab 15: REST API Integration - Authenticate (
OTCSTicket), push documents, apply metadata, and search using the v1/v2 REST API. (Includes ready-to-use Postman & Swagger JSON collections).
Each folder in this repository represents a complete lab and contains:
- A detailed
README.mdexplaining the objective, logical architecture, and step-by-step configuration. - A
diagrams_&_screenshots/folder containing visual aids, architecture flows, and GIF demonstrations of the expected outcomes. - A
code/folder (where applicable) containing SQL queries, HTML/JS snippets, or Postman API Collections.
Recommendation: If you are new to OpenText, I highly recommend starting at Lab 01 and working sequentially, as the HR scenario builds upon objects created in previous labs.
Please note that this repository is intended as a static reference guide and documentation archive.
It is designed to be a "read-only" resource to share my personal notes, configurations, and learning journey with the community. Because the course is finalized and structured sequentially, this repository is not currently open for external contributions or pull requests.
However, you are more than welcome to fork this repository, download the code snippets, and adapt the concepts for your own enterprise environments or personal learning!
I created this guide as a compilation of my personal studies and practical experiences with OpenText Content Server. While I have strived to make the information as accurate, secure, and helpful as possible, every enterprise IT environment is uniquely configured. Please ensure you test any scripts, SQL queries, or API calls in a safe Development/Testing environment before ever applying them to a Production server.
Thank you for visiting, and I wish you the best of luck on your ECM journey! ❤️
